Simple Zettelkasten Guide

Knowledge management
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Using a Zettelkasten as a Student

First Question to Answer is what areas of information do students develop?

Undergraduate Students

Undergraduate students are not developing new knowledge but instead developing an understanding of existing knowledge. What does that look like?

You are creating an understanding of a set of ideas and the relationships between them. How the ideas connect to each other and the wider picture (e.g. the field you are studying) is the context.

With a zettelkasten, you have two options.

  1. You can create notes out of what you are studying and then use them as a basis for further development, because all knowledge builds off each other. But this is not always necessary, more of a personal preference, usually depending on how well you know the material. You typically don’t have notes for material that is so well ingrained in you because there is no need for them. You can just rely on your memory instead.

  2. You can creates notes out of what you are studying as a way to facilitate understanding. Often times explicitly writing down concepts and their connections forces you to really understand what you are learning, so creating notes can serve as a elaboration tool for learning. See “processing a textbook for understanding” below for how this would look pratically.

When taking notes to facilitate understanding (option 2 above) it is important to keep in my that you are engaging in a trade off. By choosing to take notes on a topic, you are giving up precious time to the universe and that may not be worth it. For example, I’m not going to create notes for every word in the english language because that would be a waste of time. Instead I might create notes for words I find very important and am actively writing about. You want to do the same thing with textbooks.

Think of it as a spectrum. One one end, it is a waste of time when you are creating notes around concepts you are extremely familiar with because you already have mental notes. On the opposite end, you are wasting time by taking notes on concepts you’ll never use or write about. You want to be in the middle, where you are taking notes on concepts that you don’t know so well but will still use in your working life.

Processing a Textbook for Understanding (option 2 above)

When processing a undergraduate textbook, I think of a four tasks

  1. Create notes for the important concepts themselves (often bolded terms in the book)
  2. Link the note (concepts) with other important notes (concepts) in the textbook chapter
  3. Link the note with the immediate context it sits in (e.g. the textbook chapter)
  4. Link the note to the wider context (e.g. the field you are studying)

For example, I am undergraduate psychology student (hypothetical) with a plan on going into the sub field of cognitive psychology. When reading I would create a note for the concept of “semantic memory”. Following the four tasks, I would:

  1. Create a note for Semantic Memory
  2. Link it to the related concept of “episodic memory”
  3. Both semantic memory and episodic memory are forms of explicit memories, which in turn is a form of long term memory. So I would create a link to my notes on long term memory and explicit memory. This is the “immediate context” that semantic memory sits in.
  4. I would then create a link to the wider context, saying why “episodic memory” is important to the field of cognitive psychology. Or even doing something as simple as including a tag in the note #CogSci

Using my Textbook Note for Future Development (option 1 above)

Now that I have a basic note on “semantic memory” I can use it as a starting point for further development. I created this note during my “introduction to psychology” college course. In my junior year I take a course on memory or cognition. In this course, the concept of “semantic memory” gets elaborated on even more in the corresponding textbook. So I add the most important parts of the elaboration to my original note. Then at the bottom of the note I may also put in references to studies we looked at surrounding semantic memory.

Two years go by and when I eventually get to grad school, I do even more research on the topic of “semantic memory”, collecting in my note all the cutting edge research that has been done on the topic. At some point I see an component of semantic memory that hasn’t been explained or explored, so I make that into my dissertation. I create my own study and add that to my note on semantic memory.

As you see, over a long period of time I’m elaborating on this concept more and more, further developing it in my notes. I’m essentially creating a wiki entry, collecting all the important information I’ve come across on this topic. For this example its all been one note, but in reality what I’d do is create multiple notes. At each step in this process (intro course, intermediate course, grad school, own research) I would make a new note and connect it to the previous one, thereby creating a sequence of notes on the topic of “semantic memory”. The reason for this is that it allows you to use the information of a note in multiple contexts. Say for example that the study I did has implications for other concepts. By having it in its own note, I am able to create a link to it. If I didn’t and instead just linked to the whole page on semantic memory, then it would be confusing and a pain in the ass to find.

Graduate Students

You will get the most use out of a zettelkasten as you become a graduate student, where the goal is to not only to create a deeper understanding but further develop the knowledge of your chosen field through a thesis/dissertation. In this way, you are using the zettelkasten to track where your knowledge currently stands and facilitate the generation of new ideas through connecting material.

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